by Daniel Gauss
I started playing with the idea that Constantine P. Cavafy might be a type of Faust-like character who beats the devil by making temptation irrelevant. Through a poetry devoted to memory, sensuality and the afterlife of desire, Cavafy undermines the Christian-Faustian assumption that pleasure necessarily decays into guilt, disappointment or damnation.
In Cavafy’s work, ecstatic gay sexual experience is not morally or spiritually ruinous, but can, in fact, be among the highest forms of human physical and emotional intensity, experientially irretrievable as a discrete moment, haunting and provocative as a memory but still incorruptible.
Frankly, it might be more accurate for me to say I wish to use Cavafy as a type of anti-Faust. I see Cavafy as a queer poet who dismantles a foundational Western myth from the inside out. What Cavafy preserves in memory is not shame but a type of radiance (a term he uses in his poetry). The sensual experiences of youth do not become evidence of moral lapse or failure even though he might speak ironically about “dissolution.”
Indeed, when Cavafy explores dissolution, it functions as a positive factor in his development as a poet. By dissolution he means a life lived outside the moral pretenses and hypocritical codes of propriety of Alexandria under British rule in the early 20th century, a social world where queer desire often had to be managed through concealment, subterfuge and obliquity.
Dissolution meant a life of erotic freedom and experience, charged secrecy, bold risk and nonconforming encounters that would have been condemned and caused severe social repercussions. For Cavafy dissolution becomes the wellspring of his creative brilliance, showing that the unconventional, even taboo, experiences of his youth were what shaped his art. Read more »
Let’s get the humble-bragging out of the way first: I’ve always had a remarkable memory. 
Last night I (Danielle Spencer) went to the New York Film Festival screening of Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) in Alice Tully hall at Lincoln Center. I last joined a large gathering 19 months ago, in March of 2020.
Novels set in New York and Berlin of the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, just as subculture was at its apogee and the first major gentrification waves in various neighborhoods of the two cities were underway—particularly when they also try to tell the coming-of-age story of a young art student maturing into an artist—these novels run the risk of digressing into art scene cameos and excursions on drug excess. In her novel A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, second edition 2018), Andrea Scrima purposely avoids effects of this kind. Instead, she concentrates on quietly capturing moments that illuminate her narrator’s ties to the locations she’s lived in and the lives she’s lived there.